RESUMEN
Home advantage (HA) regularly occurs in volleyball (Pollard et al., 2017: men: 56.62%, women: 55.26%). Research to date has investigated primarily small samples of mostly female matches and not looked into the potential impact of spectators on HA. This archival analysis uses multilevel modelling to examine HA in professional German volleyball (men & women) over 25 seasons in all regular and play-off matches (Nâ¯=â¯6,833). We analyze how spectators drive HA and whether this projects to the COVID-19 season 2020/21. When intercepts varied between teams (2-level model, ICCâ¯=â¯27%), the winning probability increased when playing at home (men: 57.01%, ORmenâ¯=â¯2.39, dâ¯=â¯0.48; women: 55.39%, ORwomenâ¯=â¯2.19, dâ¯=â¯0.43), while controlling for team strength, interaction with gender, and travelling distance. More spectators had a negligible effect on the men's and women's chances (|d| < 0.07). Similar trends were observed for the probability of winning sets. Contrary to other team sports (e.g., soccer), there is no HA-development over the last decades.
Asunto(s)
COVID-19 , Neoplasia Endocrina Múltiple Tipo 2a , Voleibol , Humanos , Femenino , Masculino , Modelos Logísticos , COVID-19/epidemiología , Hombres , ArchivosRESUMEN
While the effect of missing audiences has been studied numerously in team sports with diverse effects, studies on individual performances are rare. The current investigation analyzes performances of professional dart players in (a) the absence of spectators, (b) the presence of real crowds, and (c) artificial crowd noise (simulated crowds) substituting live spectators during the COVID-19 pandemic. Empirical evidence suggests that performances in coordination-based accuracy tasks are negatively impacted by the presence of others. Therefore, we hypothesize that performance of elite darts players deteriorates in the presence of a real audience (RA) in comparison to no audience (NA) and simulated audience (SA). https://dartsorakel.com provided the data of professional tournaments played from 2018 to 2021, which included N = 26,724 individual performances from k = 442 players (98.8% male). How RA and SA impacted checkout percentage (CP) and three-dart average (3DA) was analyzed using separate multilevel models, adding various control variables. Competing with audiences (SA and RA) resulted in decreased CP with an effect of ßstand_real = - .20, p < .001, and ßstand_sim = - .14, p < .001. 3DA increased with SA, ßstand_sim = .08, p < .001, and decreased with RA, ßstand_sim = - .07, p < .001. The results show that real crowds appear to have a negative impact on darts performance, yet effect sizes are small.